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Traditional (SQL) databases rely primarily on keyword-based searches to retrieve information. These searches match the exact words or phrases in your query to the text stored in the database. While effective for many applications, this method has limitations when it comes to understanding context or finding relevant information that... doesn’t include the exact keywords. Hybrid search combines the strengths of traditional keyword-based BM25 search with the advanced capabilities of semantic search. To effectively implement a hybrid search, a vector database is essential. Vector databases go beyond just words; they understand the meaning behind the data. They transform data such as text, images, or audio into numerical representations called vectors. These vector embeddings enable the database to find similar items, even if they don't share exact keywords. When you integrate hybrid search with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, you can achieve higher accuracy in retrieved context and better output in generated responses. Learn more about RAG systems in this video with Victoria Slocum:show more

Femke Plantinga

12,967 subscribers

140,618 views • 2 years ago •via X (Twitter)

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9 Comments

Abhishek Singh2 years ago

Really effective and simple explanation Femke! How did you generate the diagram animation?

Femke Plantinga2 years ago

Thank you! Kudos @victorialslocum to animating these designs. 🫶 Rive is great for making these.

esamyak Indore2 years ago

cleared concepts thanks

Femke Plantinga2 years ago

Thank you! 🙏

digid2 years ago

Wow! Awesome work! I will check the material to learn more, but what I've watched so far it's pretty clever. Congrats!

QuantizedHuman2 years ago

The dutch accent always shines through, lol. Well explained. (Goed gedaan, en ik dol gwn een beetje.)

Nikhil Kumar2 years ago

Nice, but still need to maintain relation between tables for complex schemas

John the Scott2 years ago

huh? sql derives from predicate logic. would you describe predicate logic as "keyword-based"?

Manny Bernabe1 year ago

So good.

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Femke Plantinga

23,911 views • 2 years ago

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Andrew Ng

137,166 views • 2 years ago

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Clara Shih

49,646 views • 2 years ago

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Femke Plantinga

120,565 views • 2 years ago

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Santiago

40,627 views • 1 year ago

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Andrew Ng

146,313 views • 1 year ago

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Andrew Ng

124,656 views • 1 year ago

Learn to optimize RAG for cost and performance in our new short course, Prompt Compression and Query Optimization, created with MongoDB and taught by Richmond Alake. This course teaches you to combine traditional database capabilities with vector search using MongoDB for RAG. You'll learn these techniques: - Vector search: For semantic matching of user queries - Filtering using metadata: Pre- and post-filtering to narrow search results - Projections: Selecting only necessary fields to minimize data returned - Boosting: Reranking results to improve relevance - Prompt compression: Using a small LLM to compress context, significantly reducing token count and processing costs These methods address scaling, performance, and security challenges in large-scale RAG applications. You can sign up here:

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Andrew Ng

71,722 views • 2 years ago

This is, by far, one of the best uses of modern AI. If you don't use embeddings when querying your database, you are definitely leaving a lot on the table. In this video, I'll show you how to run semantic searches using OpenAI and PostgreSQL. It's all thanks to Pgai, an open-source PostgreSQL extension: Here's what will happen: 1. We'll create a simple table with news articles 2. We'll generate embeddings for those articles 3. We'll run queries on top of those embeddings For this video, I generated the embeddings using a simple query, but pgai Vectorizer would do the same automatically as new information makes it into the database. This is awesome! If you have a PostgreSQL database with data you are searching over, you should start experimenting with semantic searches immediately. For most use cases, a combination of full-text search + semantic search is the best approach. If you don't have a PostgreSQL database around, you can try free for 30 days using Timescale: Thanks to the TimescaleDB (by Tiger Data) team for partnering with me on this post!

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Santiago

110,133 views • 1 year ago

🚨 Tiger Data - Creators of TimescaleDB (Yes! the team behind TimescaleDB) is quietly revolutionizing how we build agents. The Old Way: Glueing together Postgres + Vector DBs + Search tools = complexity. The New Way: Tiger Data’s Agentic Postgres handles it all natively 🔥 What’s now possible 🧵 ↓ ✦ Hybrid retrieval → combine keyword filtering and vector similarity in a single query ✦ Forkable databases → retrieval and safe experimentation without external systems ✦ Native Postgres semantics → everything stays queryable, inspectable, and debuggable in SQL Why this matters: → Fewer moving parts in RAG pipelines → No extra infrastructure to stitch together → Agents can iterate and learn safely → Production data stays isolated and protected This is an awesome shift! Stop bolting workflows onto your database. Let your database be the workflow 🔥

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Chaz Wargnier ♨️

20,190 views • 6 months ago

Researchers built a new RAG approach that: - does not need a vector DB. - does not embed data. - involves no chunking. - performs no similarity search. And it hit 98.7% accuracy on a financial benchmark (SOTA). Here's the core problem with RAG that this new approach solves: Traditional RAG chunks documents, embeds them into vectors, and retrieves based on semantic similarity. But similarity ≠ relevance. When you ask "What were the debt trends in 2023?", a vector search returns chunks that look similar. But the actual answer might be buried in some Appendix, referenced on some page, in a section that shares zero semantic overlap with your query. Traditional RAG would likely never find it. PageIndex (open-source) solves this. Instead of chunking and embedding, PageIndex builds a hierarchical tree structure from your documents, like an intelligent table of contents. Then it uses reasoning to traverse that tree. For instance, the model doesn't ask: "What text looks similar to this query?" Instead, it asks: "Based on this document's structure, where would a human expert look for this answer?" That's a fundamentally different approach with: - No arbitrary chunking that breaks context. - No vector DB infrastructure to maintain. - Traceable retrieval to see exactly why it chose a specific section. - The ability to see in-document references ("see Table 5.3") the way a human would. But here's the deeper issue that it solves. Vector search treats every query as independent. But documents have structure and logic, like sections that reference other sections and context that builds across pages. PageIndex respects that structure instead of flattening it into embeddings. Do note that this approach may not make sense in every use case since traditional vector search is still fast, simple, and works well for many applications. But for professional documents that require domain expertise and multi-step reasoning, this tree-based, reasoning-first approach shines. For instance, PageIndex achieved 98.7% accuracy on FinanceBench, significantly outperforming traditional vector-based RAG systems on complex financial document analysis. Everything is fully open-source, so you can see the full implementation in GitHub and try it yourself. I have shared the GitHub repo in the replies!

Researchers built a new RAG approach that: - does not need a vector DB. - does not embed data. - involves no chunking. - performs no similarity search. And it hit 98.7% accuracy on a financial benchmark (SOTA). Here's the core problem with RAG that this new approach solves: Traditional RAG chunks documents, embeds them into vectors, and retrieves based on semantic similarity. But similarity ≠ relevance. When you ask "What were the debt trends in 2023?", a vector search returns chunks that look similar. But the actual answer might be buried in some Appendix, referenced on some page, in a section that shares zero semantic overlap with your query. Traditional RAG would likely never find it. PageIndex (open-source) solves this. Instead of chunking and embedding, PageIndex builds a hierarchical tree structure from your documents, like an intelligent table of contents. Then it uses reasoning to traverse that tree. For instance, the model doesn't ask: "What text looks similar to this query?" Instead, it asks: "Based on this document's structure, where would a human expert look for this answer?" That's a fundamentally different approach with: - No arbitrary chunking that breaks context. - No vector DB infrastructure to maintain. - Traceable retrieval to see exactly why it chose a specific section. - The ability to see in-document references ("see Table 5.3") the way a human would. But here's the deeper issue that it solves. Vector search treats every query as independent. But documents have structure and logic, like sections that reference other sections and context that builds across pages. PageIndex respects that structure instead of flattening it into embeddings. Do note that this approach may not make sense in every use case since traditional vector search is still fast, simple, and works well for many applications. But for professional documents that require domain expertise and multi-step reasoning, this tree-based, reasoning-first approach shines. For instance, PageIndex achieved 98.7% accuracy on FinanceBench, significantly outperforming traditional vector-based RAG systems on complex financial document analysis. Everything is fully open-source, so you can see the full implementation in GitHub and try it yourself. I have shared the GitHub repo in the replies!

Avi Chawla

973,450 views • 7 months ago

New short course: Building Multimodal Search and RAG", by Weaviate AI Database's Sebastia(N_) Witalec ✊🏽✊🏾✊🏿. Contrastive learning is used to train models to map vectors into an embedding space by pulling similar concepts closer together and pushing dissimilar concepts away from each other. This technique is also used to train multimodal embedding models that capture semantic similarity across different modalities like text, images, and audio. These multimodal embeddings can be used to build multimodal search and RAG systems. In this course, you'll learn how contrastive learning works, and how to add multimodality to RAG – so your models can draw on diverse, relevant context to answer questions. For example, a query about a financial report might synthesize information from text snippets, graphs, tables, and slides. You will also learn how visual instruction tuning lets you integrate image understanding into language models, and build a multi-vector recommender system using Weaviate’s open-source vector database. Please sign up here:

New short course: Building Multimodal Search and RAG", by Weaviate AI Database's Sebastia(N_) Witalec ✊🏽✊🏾✊🏿. Contrastive learning is used to train models to map vectors into an embedding space by pulling similar concepts closer together and pushing dissimilar concepts away from each other. This technique is also used to train multimodal embedding models that capture semantic similarity across different modalities like text, images, and audio. These multimodal embeddings can be used to build multimodal search and RAG systems. In this course, you'll learn how contrastive learning works, and how to add multimodality to RAG – so your models can draw on diverse, relevant context to answer questions. For example, a query about a financial report might synthesize information from text snippets, graphs, tables, and slides. You will also learn how visual instruction tuning lets you integrate image understanding into language models, and build a multi-vector recommender system using Weaviate’s open-source vector database. Please sign up here:

Andrew Ng

104,371 views • 2 years ago

We're unlocking next-level AI capabilities with the launch of our Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG) architecture! 🌟 By integrating a sophisticated information retrieval system, RAG empowers our Large Language Model (LLM), Qwen, with an extra layer of context, allowing it to access industry-specific insights or a company's proprietary data on demand. At the heart of RAG's knowledgebase lies the Vector Engine – a powerhouse of semantic recall ensuring all data is meticulously preserved and readily accessible. Plus, with Alibaba Cloud's suite of vector database solutions, we're at the forefront of augmented data retrieval, offering unprecedented precision and speed. Get ready to transform your data strategy with RAG! #AlibabaCloud #AI #Innovation #DataStrategy #VectorEngine #RAG #AIandBigDataSummit2024 #AIForward

We're unlocking next-level AI capabilities with the launch of our Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG) architecture! 🌟 By integrating a sophisticated information retrieval system, RAG empowers our Large Language Model (LLM), Qwen, with an extra layer of context, allowing it to access industry-specific insights or a company's proprietary data on demand. At the heart of RAG's knowledgebase lies the Vector Engine – a powerhouse of semantic recall ensuring all data is meticulously preserved and readily accessible. Plus, with Alibaba Cloud's suite of vector database solutions, we're at the forefront of augmented data retrieval, offering unprecedented precision and speed. Get ready to transform your data strategy with RAG! #AlibabaCloud #AI #Innovation #DataStrategy #VectorEngine #RAG #AIandBigDataSummit2024 #AIForward

Alibaba Cloud

9,636,416 views • 2 years ago

Big moment for Postgres! AI agents broke the idea of what a database is supposed to do. Traditional databases were built for humans, and Agents broke that model. - They branch endlessly. - They run ten experiments at once. - They need isolation, context, memory, structured reasoning, and safe sandboxes. Letting agents touch production systems is terrifying because the old model of Postgres was never built for this kind of behavior. Agentic Postgres is an agent-ready version of Postgres by TimescaleDB (by Tiger Data) that solves this. I think it is one of the biggest upgrades to the Agent stack this year and Tiger Data is working with me on this post to share what they did. Some key features: > It instantly creates branches of an entire database, which is perfect for parallel agent evals, safe experiments, migrations, or isolated testing. Forks take seconds and cost almost nothing. > It comes with a built-in MCP server, which agents can use to get schema guidance, best practices, and safe, structured access to Postgres. This is also helpful to run migrations with a real understanding. > It comes with actual hybrid search (vector search and BM25), so Agents can retrieve data directly inside the database. > The database is Memory native. This gives a persistent context for Agents to evolve. This is one of the first times I have seen Postgres feel ready for the AI native era.

Big moment for Postgres! AI agents broke the idea of what a database is supposed to do. Traditional databases were built for humans, and Agents broke that model. - They branch endlessly. - They run ten experiments at once. - They need isolation, context, memory, structured reasoning, and safe sandboxes. Letting agents touch production systems is terrifying because the old model of Postgres was never built for this kind of behavior. Agentic Postgres is an agent-ready version of Postgres by TimescaleDB (by Tiger Data) that solves this. I think it is one of the biggest upgrades to the Agent stack this year and Tiger Data is working with me on this post to share what they did. Some key features: > It instantly creates branches of an entire database, which is perfect for parallel agent evals, safe experiments, migrations, or isolated testing. Forks take seconds and cost almost nothing. > It comes with a built-in MCP server, which agents can use to get schema guidance, best practices, and safe, structured access to Postgres. This is also helpful to run migrations with a real understanding. > It comes with actual hybrid search (vector search and BM25), so Agents can retrieve data directly inside the database. > The database is Memory native. This gives a persistent context for Agents to evolve. This is one of the first times I have seen Postgres feel ready for the AI native era.

Avi Chawla

94,290 views • 9 months ago

I don’t think people realize the scale of data behind the JBP Search Engine. Every single episode since Episode 1 has been transcribed and converted into embeddings for semantic search. This isn’t keyword matching. It understands the context of your query and returns the exact moment you’re looking for…not just a list of episodes where something was mentioned. 1,415 episodes. ~3 hours each. Over 600GB of locally stored audio + additional metadata powering search quality. Could you do it? Maybe, but just know, I’ve personally spent thousands of dollars in compute to make this possible. There’s no way around it when dealing with this much data.

I don’t think people realize the scale of data behind the JBP Search Engine. Every single episode since Episode 1 has been transcribed and converted into embeddings for semantic search. This isn’t keyword matching. It understands the context of your query and returns the exact moment you’re looking for…not just a list of episodes where something was mentioned. 1,415 episodes. ~3 hours each. Over 600GB of locally stored audio + additional metadata powering search quality. Could you do it? Maybe, but just know, I’ve personally spent thousands of dollars in compute to make this possible. There’s no way around it when dealing with this much data.

burner account

130,807 views • 3 months ago

LangChain: Chat with Your Data, a new free short course created with Harrison Chase, is now available! In this 1 hour course, you’ll learn how to build one of the most requested LLM-based applications: Answering questions using information from a document or collection of documents (often called Retrieval Augmented Generation). You'll also learn how to use vector stores and embeddings to retrieve document chunks relevant to a query. I hope you enjoy the course!

LangChain: Chat with Your Data, a new free short course created with Harrison Chase, is now available! In this 1 hour course, you’ll learn how to build one of the most requested LLM-based applications: Answering questions using information from a document or collection of documents (often called Retrieval Augmented Generation). You'll also learn how to use vector stores and embeddings to retrieve document chunks relevant to a query. I hope you enjoy the course!

Andrew Ng

384,434 views • 3 years ago

We’re expanding the Gemini API File Search tool 🔍 with 3 new updates that enable developers to more easily build multimodal RAG systems with enhanced precision: + Multimodal Support: By leveraging our Gemini Embedding 2 model, File Search can now reason across image and text simultaneously. + Custom Metadata Filtering: Bring structure to unstructured data by tagging files with custom key-value labels. This pre-filters your data and boosts search speed. + Exact citations: File Search can now capture and return the exact source (down to the page number) for every piece of information indexed. See multimodal File Search in action with our example app in Google AI Studio. Chat with your entire image and doc library, ask questions, and trace answers back to the source:

We’re expanding the Gemini API File Search tool 🔍 with 3 new updates that enable developers to more easily build multimodal RAG systems with enhanced precision: + Multimodal Support: By leveraging our Gemini Embedding 2 model, File Search can now reason across image and text simultaneously. + Custom Metadata Filtering: Bring structure to unstructured data by tagging files with custom key-value labels. This pre-filters your data and boosts search speed. + Exact citations: File Search can now capture and return the exact source (down to the page number) for every piece of information indexed. See multimodal File Search in action with our example app in Google AI Studio. Chat with your entire image and doc library, ask questions, and trace answers back to the source:

Google AI Developers

108,801 views • 4 months ago

Finally, a database can generate its own embeddings now. When you add semantic search to an app, the standard step is to wire up an external embedding service, sync the vectors to a separate store, and write glue to keep everything updated as data changes. While this is a standard setup, problems show up later when your data changes, but your pipeline has already run, and search quality starts degrading in ways that are hard to pin down because nothing is explicitly broken. MongoDB Atlas handles this with auto-embedding. You point an index at a text field, specify a Voyage AI model, and Atlas generates the vectors inside the database. When a document changes, it re-embeds itself automatically, so that the search always stays grounded to the current context. I tested this against MongoDB's sample movies collection, 21,000 plots indexed with one config. A plain English query about dystopian machine-controlled futures returned semantically relevant results, despite having no keyword overlap. You can try it yourself here: One index config replaced the embedding service, the vector store, and the sync layer you used to maintain separately. The video below depicts this in action, and I worked with the MongoDB team to put this together. I have also put together a full LLM engineering roadmap covering what it actually takes to build and ship production AI systems in 2026. Read it below.

Finally, a database can generate its own embeddings now. When you add semantic search to an app, the standard step is to wire up an external embedding service, sync the vectors to a separate store, and write glue to keep everything updated as data changes. While this is a standard setup, problems show up later when your data changes, but your pipeline has already run, and search quality starts degrading in ways that are hard to pin down because nothing is explicitly broken. MongoDB Atlas handles this with auto-embedding. You point an index at a text field, specify a Voyage AI model, and Atlas generates the vectors inside the database. When a document changes, it re-embeds itself automatically, so that the search always stays grounded to the current context. I tested this against MongoDB's sample movies collection, 21,000 plots indexed with one config. A plain English query about dystopian machine-controlled futures returned semantically relevant results, despite having no keyword overlap. You can try it yourself here: One index config replaced the embedding service, the vector store, and the sync layer you used to maintain separately. The video below depicts this in action, and I worked with the MongoDB team to put this together. I have also put together a full LLM engineering roadmap covering what it actually takes to build and ship production AI systems in 2026. Read it below.

Avi Chawla

14,463 views • 1 month ago

everybody talks about building AI chatbots, but nobody tells you HOW to do it that's why I made a full practical walkthrough on how to build an AI chatbot that's hooked up to your own custom knowledgebase inside of the walk-through i go over: – data collection: gathering all relevant documents, conversations, and info - preprocessing: cleaning up and formatting the collected data - chunking: break down the cleaned data into smaller, manageable pieces - embedding & storing in a vector database - RAG & chatbot integration: using RAG to allow the chatbot to retrieve relevant information from the vector database based on a user's question reply to this tweet w/ the word “RAG” & I’ll send it to you (must be following so I can DM)

everybody talks about building AI chatbots, but nobody tells you HOW to do it that's why I made a full practical walkthrough on how to build an AI chatbot that's hooked up to your own custom knowledgebase inside of the walk-through i go over: – data collection: gathering all relevant documents, conversations, and info - preprocessing: cleaning up and formatting the collected data - chunking: break down the cleaned data into smaller, manageable pieces - embedding & storing in a vector database - RAG & chatbot integration: using RAG to allow the chatbot to retrieve relevant information from the vector database based on a user's question reply to this tweet w/ the word “RAG” & I’ll send it to you (must be following so I can DM)

Tyler

83,577 views • 1 year ago

I can search a database with 32 million records in less than 50 milliseconds. This speed is insane! There's no reason your search is slow. There's no reason you aren't using this library when building applications with a lot of data. Take a look at typesense |. It's an open-source search engine. It's crazy fast and easy to use. They are sponsoring this post. Here is their GitHub repository: You can use the library in Python, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Swift, and pretty much any other programming language out there. Here are some of the things you can do with Typesense: • Vector search over embeddings • Conversational search for RAG applications • Image similarity search • Voice search And it does all of this extremely fast. A few interesting notes about the library: • Optimized for developer happiness • Works out of the box for most use cases • Very intuitive API • Easy to deploy and scale Probably the best way to compare them is against ElasticSearch. The latter is much more complex to configure and run with a steep learning curve. Check their GitHub repository. They have examples, tutorials, and everything you need.

I can search a database with 32 million records in less than 50 milliseconds. This speed is insane! There's no reason your search is slow. There's no reason you aren't using this library when building applications with a lot of data. Take a look at typesense |. It's an open-source search engine. It's crazy fast and easy to use. They are sponsoring this post. Here is their GitHub repository: You can use the library in Python, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Swift, and pretty much any other programming language out there. Here are some of the things you can do with Typesense: • Vector search over embeddings • Conversational search for RAG applications • Image similarity search • Voice search And it does all of this extremely fast. A few interesting notes about the library: • Optimized for developer happiness • Works out of the box for most use cases • Very intuitive API • Easy to deploy and scale Probably the best way to compare them is against ElasticSearch. The latter is much more complex to configure and run with a steep learning curve. Check their GitHub repository. They have examples, tutorials, and everything you need.

Santiago

160,154 views • 2 years ago